I Am the Electric Onion

Walking is the only thing I do quickly. My preferred pace for doing anything else is glacial. Entropy over the years is partly responsible—french fried neurons, synapses muddied with brain phlegm, tinnitus a never ending avalanche of static and infuriatingly high-pitched and echoing alien signal tones.

I’m writing this on drugs. I’m always on drugs—a daily mix of anti depression/anxiety/psychosis meds—but I’ve been taking those for enough years that I don’t notice them. It feels weird telling anyone that I take an anti-psychotic, so I qualify that as a very low dose, nothing to be alarmed about. I don’t recall the explanation for why that particular drug is in the mix, so I tell myself it’s to mitigate the fact that it is not I who is insane, but the world. Turn off, tune out, drop in, I always say.

I was asked a question recently, the same question, multiple times. This was during a series of behavioral questionnaires. The question was, “do you have trouble concentrating or focusing when someone is speaking to you.” Each time I checked the same box: No. Never. Not me. Less than two weeks later, in a small group with other male survivors, while someone was speaking, I noticed that I was not able to concentrate on the words at all. I also recognized that this was actually my standard mode of listening, or not listening as it turns out. I was dumbfounded. Kind of like how when you become hyper aware that there is a lump of muscle in your mouth, just sitting there taking up space.

The fish guru asked the fish disciple, “how’s the water today?” The fish disciple blinked a few times, then asked, “what’s water?” The fish guru said, “we fish don’t have tongues.”

Meditation is not training oneself to achieve enlightenment. It is training oneself to recognize and nurture the conditions in which enlightenment is more likely to occur. Everyone has moments of enlightenment sporadically throughout their lives. Nobody needs a priest or guru to find their way. We are made of stardust. In Moby Dick, Queequeg’s elaborate chest tattoo was a map, so that he could always find his way home. He didn’t realize that he himself was already the only map he needed.

BTW, sorry tech bros, your home has always been, and always will be, on the earth, and not the moon or mars. How sad it is to me that so many people continue to search for a new mother, while continuing to ignore their original one, who is in the soil.

My new drug is Amphetamine-Dextroamphetamine, aka Adderall. I do not like amphetamine, or any kind of speedy drug. I get a buzz drinking decaf. The first thing I said to my shrink after receiving my diagnosis of ADHD was, "I don’t want to take any more medications."

I have suspected my ADHD for a long time. Now that I’m learning what it actually is, and how it presents, I realize I have always had ADHD. It just took me until now to figure this out. Glacial.

From a very young age, I was a survivor of trauma, but I couldn’t see that until I was in my 40‘s. For 10 years after that, I couldn’t see the full picture of the causes of my trauma. Another 16 years after that, I decided to stop pretending that I’m not autistic.

This past spring, while at a MenHealing staff retreat in the wilderness, I had an emotional breakdown that was not unlike the tumultuous dissembling that happened when my I was finally able to face the memory of my abuse. I was sitting in a large circle of chairs with people in them. I knew almost all of these people. I had been with them like this before. I absolutely trusted these people and felt safe with them. I had come to this gathering with excited anticipation. Previous retreats were a lot of fun, and this was certain to be that.

In this, the first of several group sessions, the agenda was to introduce ourselves to the group with just a few words: our name, where we were from, and one thing we hoped to contribute or experience during the weekend.

I’ve done this a lot with various MenHealing gatherings, but for the last several years, mostly on zoom. The last time we did it in person was at last year’s retreat, in this very familiar and comfortable space. These retreats are wonderful occasions, and I treasure the experiences they bring. So, why, one might ask, was I terrified at the opening circle?

My heart was pounding, my mind was racing, and my body was on high alert. My amygdala has a hair trigger, and I physically felt as if my life was in danger. I flashed back to another time, one of many from long ago, where this happened.

I remembered the first day of my Acting 101 class in college. I had been acting for several years, and I was confident and comfortable with my skill and ability as an actor. I was excited and eager to be there. Until I wasn’t. The first exercise we were given was for everyone, all at once, to get down on the floor and improvise with movement and sound. We were told not to act, nor to use real speech. Think of it as childhood play, he said. Bam! Fight or flight! I felt an existential fear, and could not move.

Out of about 20 students, most were on the floor in seconds. Others took some time building up the nerve, but it wasn’t long before I was the only person still standing. The instructor looked at me and said, “if you don’t do this exercise, you will not be allowed to continue in this class.” I don’t recall how it played out after that, but I was indeed kicked out of my first acting class.

An aside: Because of this incident, I changed my focus of study from acting to lighting design. While I continued to act sporadically afterwards, I believe now that this experience was the beginning of my transition from acting to design and technical production.

I dwelled on this memory while other people were introducing themselves, so that when it was my turn, I was caught off guard, and fully unprepared, or unwilling, to speak. Almost in a trance, I stood up, mumbling something like, “I’m sorry but I have to do this.”

40 years after receiving the instruction to roll around the floor and make nonsense sounds, I did it. Knowing how bizarre this might seem, I kept it brief, but I did it. I have always hated, and been afraid of, improvisation.

Because my fellow retreaters are the awesome people they are, nobody questioned my demonstration. The only responses I remember were smiles and laughs. I was also able to relax and feel comfortable, and participate fully, for the rest of that night’s session. That night I wrote a few words in my journal about the experience, but it wasn’t until the following morning that I had a moment of enlightenment about it.

We were again seated in a large circle. Initially, I was feeling fine, but I was struggling to focus. I ruminated about the night before? Why did I do that? Why now? Bam! It was happening again. Fight or flight! I was triggered again. I had to get out of there. I whispered to the person next to me, “I’m ok, but I need to leave for a little while.”

I left the building and walked into the woods. I followed a tiny dirt footpath with no other intention than to be alone. Shortly, I stopped and sat down on the trail. Then the tears came. A flood into sobbing. My primary playground as a child was a series of trails just like this one in the woods behind my house. I comforted myself by touching the dirt, then some moss and ferns. I wanted to cry on them, as if my tears might matter to the earth.

Then it came. One of those moments of sudden understanding. I am autistic. I have always been autistic. I have always known I am autistic, even if I didn’t always know the word. And I have always refused to accept it. I felt myself disintegrating into this recognition. It was not unlike the time I fell off the couch and onto the floor in my therapists office that day I remembered what my mother did to me. It was, in fact, exactly like that. One strong aspect of the breakdown was a feeling of being alone. I had my phone with me, so I called Pam. And I confessed.

In the same way I denied myself as a survivor of sexual assault, for most of my life I have expended a great deal of energy masking and hiding my autism. Even from myself. And doing so has been exhausting. I had reached a breaking point and surrendered to myself. Between the heaves of breath, a lot of worlds came out of me in a torrent. “I can’t do this any more… I can’t keep pretending… It's too hard... This is who I am.” I cannot sufficiently express the depth of the relief I felt.

Some who know me might question this about me. That’s primarily because of two factors. First, my symptoms and neurological idiosyncracies are modest. Second—oh the irony—I am a very good actor. The point here isn’t the degree of my autism. It’s that I have been living a lie that had to die. My external and social lives aren’t really any different with this understanding. On the inside, the acceptance I feel is profound.

There are people to whom I have appeared to be cold, aloof, or difficult to connect with. To these/you I say, I’m sorry, it was me, not you.

Back to Adderall.

Receiving an ADHD diagnosis so late in life is rare (I'm 67.). Testing is not often recommended for people over 60. But my gut made me insist, and I scored pretty high. I’ll spare you the details, but I feel almost exhilarated about this. It explains so much. Not just about my past, but about my continuing and ever-present depression, among other things. I am constantly berating myself about my lack of productivity, and knowing I rarely finish any of my projects.

This diagnosis explains so much! I refer to my inability to correctly fill out forms as “form dyslexia.” After practicing Bikram Yoga for 26 years, I walked into a new studio a couple weeks ago and asked, “where does the instructor stand?” Only after someone pointed to it did I see the obvious ‘instructor stands here’ indications. My diagnosis states, "Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Predominantly Inattentive Presentation." I have difficulty paying attention. My comprehension ability is slower than my perceptions. More than once or twice, I have responded with the incorrect answer when asked my age. I'm not choosing to be absent-minded or to not pay attention. It's just how my brain works.

I have a habit of publishing things before they are fully reviewed or edited because if I don’t, I might never actually publish anything. Almost nothing I do feels complete because my brain moves too fast. The reason I say my preferred pace is glacial is because I’m fighting a brain that never stops, and my typing can never keep up with my ideas and the connections I am constantly seeing between things. It’s not like moving slow is a choice. It’s more a paralysis. I am overwhelmed with possibility and choice. Every concept expressed leads to multiple new ideas to follow.

As many writers do, I keep a small notebook with at all times, so I can write down ideas as I come across them in the wild. I'm prolific in this way. I have hundreds, maybe thousands of scraps of writing that I never get around to fleshing out. This is because the simple act of collecting ideas gives my brain all the dopamine it needs. This is why I now think of myself as a dopamine dilettante.

In my post-diagnosis session with my psychiatrist, I opened with, “no more medications, please.” There are lots of CBT resources for people with ADHD. I had already begun reading about them. But while we were discussing the situation I flippantly threw out, “unless you’ve got something that acts fast, that I can take only when I need to get some work done, something I don’t have to take every day.” She replied, “Well, actually…”

I used Adderall two days last week, to work on a website that I have been struggling to finish. In those two days, I accomplished more than I had in the prior two months. I’m using it today to finish this, which I’ve been struggling with for a week. Yeah, Adderall is a little bit speedy. But not too much. For me, it's just speedy enough that I can tolerate it, but I don't fear being seduced by it. I'm not sure that I like the way it makes me feel. But it truly has helped me reach a new plateau of self awareness and acceptance.

In a sense, my journey looks like a series of episodes of finding myself. I'm a trauma survivor. I have CPTSD. I'm autistic. Now, I have ADHD. In each of these cases, I am feeling closer to knowing who I really am. But it's really the opposite. I am not discovering myself piecemeal. Instead, I am remembering myself. These things do not make me who I am. They are simply obstacles to be navigated and overcome. With each new realization, I am breaking free from a new layer of a manufactured ego identity. When yogis talk about finding yourself through your practice, they're not talking about the self who is standing on the mat. They're talking about the person who emerged from the womb. Before all this other shit happened.